Current data centers cost about $10 million per megawatt to build, and around 80% of the facility cost is related to power infrastructure. While the operation of data centers is still dominated by the cost of hardware equipment rather than power consumption, power costs are rising while the cost of hardware is dropping. Thus, managing the power consumption of data centers has become a focus of research.
Designing and operating energy-efficient data centers involves an understanding of the relationship between resource usage and system-level power consumption. Legacy servers lack the ability to monitor their own power consumption. Retrofitting large numbers of servers with metering and monitoring or replacing these servers before the end of their life cycle is economically unfeasible. Furthermore, the cost of new servers and data center infrastructure can be reduced by not including additional hardware for power monitoring and measurement.